Modernising CRM and web systems for better patient experience

Our customer is a leading global healthcare group in the UK. They deliver high standards of care to insured, self-pay and NHS patients, running multiple hospitals, clinics, medical centres and consulting rooms.

Working in partnership with thousands of experienced consultants, they have delivered tailored, personalised care to over one million people in one year.

The client’s key systems to manage relationships with patients and partners was outdated and becoming unsupportable meaning that they were difficult to do business with, relative to competitors, putting them at a competitive disadvantage. The website was operating on an old platform that was similarly becoming unsupportable, time consuming to maintain, with no ability to add commercially valuable functionality.

Whilst trying to deliver two enterprise platforms simultaneously whilst protecting and improving the website visibility and ranking in search engine results, the programme had reached a delivery crisis point with material cost and time overruns. The strategic systems implementation partner had failed to deliver value in line with business expectations on what was a high-profile programme as part of a larger organisation transformation.

The programme team had become demoralised, with high turnover rates, misaligned delivery targets and limited understanding of the dependencies between workstreams within the programme.

Project One was appointed as the Programme Director to turnaround the delivery capability of the programme management. In collaboration with the senior players from IT and Business Change a stronger project management capability was onboarded with relevant domain specific experience.

In collaboration with the incumbent strategic systems implementation partner the scope, cost and delivery timeline was reset and re-baselined, with the implementation of refined ways of working to ensure stronger collaboration across the various teams.

A capability release schedule was developed to detail what capabilities would be delivered to the business in what sequence, that balanced implementation and operational risk with the business benefits. This capability release schedule served as the basis for the development of a detailed programme implementation plan that was developed with input from all the impacted teams – with independent challenge and verification from a broad and senior set of stakeholders.

In line with the re-baselined plan the resource requirements for the programme were re-evaluated, with some roles being rolled off and some additional roles added.

In parallel, the business requirements for the solutions were developed to ensure that the business defined how they wanted the solution to work – which was then used to evaluate the product that had been developed by the strategic systems integration partners to identify gaps that needed to be closed before being able to deliver the targeted releases.

A business case was developed that brought together all the changes in the scope, timeline, internal programme resources, new development partner and the capability release sequence to ensure that the required funding was requested and approved to enable the next phase of delivery.

The turnaround of the programme was successfully delivered with its status having transitioned from red to green over the course of seven months.  Strong programme governance was in place that maintained full control across all aspects of delivery, with clarity on scope, timeline, budget, risks and issues and the timing of delivery of the business benefits.

An appropriate network of software developments partners had been created that were able to support both the development and maintenance of the solutions as they were delivered.

Critically, the senior business stakeholders felt that they had regained control over the delivery of the programme and had a sense of confidence of the path to implementation of the solutions and the associated business benefits were on track. Similarly, the programme team had a sense of cohesion and shared ambition that delivered a higher delivery velocity, with clear quality controls.

The two platforms will provide the basis for the business to continue to dynamically meet the emerging business needs with the associated benefits to patients and partners.

Project One value Add

• Brought control and delivery certainty to a fluid and complex environment that reflected the key business priorities and benefits
• Maintained programme management controls across delivery, scope, governance, dependencies, and risks
• Created a high performing programme and operational run team that delivered above expectations.